The stainless steel fridge door allows your vegetables, dairy products, and sauces some semblance of privacy. Behind a rubber-sealed portal, your foods sit in temporary darkness, awaiting your hungry hand. But a new technology might shatter what little anonymity your produce now has, allowing you to spy on the inner life of your refrigerator from far away.
Introducing the FridgeCam, a new device out of Britain that monitors the status of your fridge, alerts you to its contents, snaps pictures of its insides, and tracks the expiration dates of all your perishables. Think of it like a baby monitor for your icebox.
The FridgeCam is a sleek, circular camera that you can install on the inside of your fridge. It livestreams your fridge, and allows users to check on its insides from an app on their smartphones. One step closer to the Black Mirror–esque kitchen of your dreams (or nightmares?).
The camera and app combination can also measure expiration dates, and will alert you as they approach—so there's no need to stand in the milk aisle attempting to remember the tiny black print on your not-yet-done milk carton at home. And my personal favorite feature: FridgeCam suggests recipes to its users based on what they already have, paying attention to forgotten items withering away in the back.
The device promises to reduce household food waste by 50% a year, by prompting its users to make better use of what they have, instead of just new items they want or need. Judging by the number of times I’ve watched roommates throw out an overdue bushel of broccoli, that’s a figure I can get behind.
The FridgeCam comes to us from a company called Smarter. They develop products to make our kitchen usage… smarter. I’m about that. They also developed a kettle that you can control from your phone so you can boil water from your bed or on your commute home. Convenient.
The FridgeCam is slated to hit the market September 2017, with shipping to the UK and the US. It retails for roughly $130. You can preorder it online here.
I might just have to throw my name on that list.
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